Welcome February – I Love New Months

I love the start of a new month. Its like you get to start over in some ways. For me my stat programs run monthly for the most part so its cool to see new data.

For instance – Not to long ago I made a post about how I knew I was in supplemental hell. Well Aaron Wall made a list of stuff for me to do to fix it (mostly in my robots.txt) and I was skeptical but I am happy to report not only am I out of supplemental hell but my Google traffic has increased 1400% in only 1 month after implementing his list of stuff.

John Heard

Good to hear you got it fixed. Oh and thanks for including me in your list Shoe…

February 1, 2007

John Loch

I dont get it.. its one thing to kill off duplicates, another entirely to get an extra 1400% in traffic ???

The bots file *reduces* the amount of content you have in the index. I dunno.. sounds like somethings missing here..

😀

February 1, 2007

GeorgeB

Removing duplicate content and pages with little to no written content bring a lot of pages out of supplemental. The mroe pages your site has in supplemental the less ranking power your domain has. If you decrease your supplemental pages your domain’s pagerank and ranking power increase.

February 1, 2007

Dugdale

Why does SEOBook robots.txt not have this?

February 1, 2007

Jonathan Kemp

Well, duh. Why didn’t we think of that? Although, the increase in traffic is probably just a result of getting out of supplementals.

February 1, 2007

Gemme

Love to see the list as well but part of the list can already be found when you add robots.txt behind the url.

February 1, 2007

SonicReducer

LOL, I bet your robots.txt is going to be your most popular page today Shoemoney.

February 1, 2007

Eddie Mace

Anyone willing to explain this a little more?

February 1, 2007

suttree

wonder, can you cloak a robots.txt? show one to users, and one to the bots?

Maybe a combination of robots, and age of domain – just time to get out? or maybe you slipped a few shoemoney shirts to google’s top se nerds?

February 1, 2007

CPA Affiliates

*L* well i think one of the big keys that aaron wall suggested at Elite Retreat is not letting bots crawl thru useless pages like link pages and galleries, as with blogs or other sites we have pages that are more fun and nto really a gain in rankings.

February 1, 2007

POOP

That list would be amazing to read!!!

February 1, 2007

ShoeMoney

thats about 50% the rest was adding dynamic descriptions/titles and doing a little onpage internal linking.

February 1, 2007

webprofessor

You wonder ? Give me a break, of course you can.

If you want to see if Shoes a big fat liar then why don’t you look at his results in the serps. See if they match what he has in the robots.txt. Make sure to check cache dates to.

…Investigate before you speculate…

February 1, 2007

webprofessor

Yeah I added dynamic titles and descriptions last month as well and its gotten a lot of blog out of supplemental. I’ll look to add the robots.txt and see how that turns out next month.

thanks for the tip Shoe

February 1, 2007

Andy Beal

Aaron probably doesn’t have the same issues as his site is older and more established – Google is more lenient if your site is established.

February 1, 2007

Tob

Shoe, are you going to have a “febrazy” month like me? Probably not 😛

February 1, 2007

doolally

“Yeah I added dynamic titles and descriptions last month”

Is this an addon you can get for wordpress?

February 1, 2007

webprofessor

Not that I know of.. you just edit the templates.

February 1, 2007

ShoeMoney

heh…. have you ever met any Google “se nerds” if so you would know how rediculas that statement is.

February 1, 2007

ShoeMoney

John check out how pagerank distribution works. I used to have almost 40,000 pages indexed by google but nothing ranked in the top 10 for anything. Now that I have disallowed tons of content that was douplicate i have good rankings again… for instance look at serps script

suttree

suttree

course now that they have money, like those enron ceo crooked nerds, they can all go on those dirt biking, i’m a tough man safari’s in africa to prove they are NOT nerds. lol

February 1, 2007

doolally

Thanks

February 1, 2007

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February 1, 2007

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February 2, 2007

Wealthy Webmaster

Hmm he didn’t say this site specifically is the one he’s talking about did he? Matt cutts said specifically that pagerank is what decides what is supplemental, so it makes sense that removing worthless pages would improve the ones that are left.

February 2, 2007

Greg

Aaron explaions this on his blog today here:http://www.seobook.com/archives/002021.shtml
If folks are still interested. In short there’s only so much link authority to go around and shoe had that authority spread too thin so he disallowed low $$$ pages to increase authority associated with high $$$ pages.

IMHO the 1400% makes this seem like a silver bullet… it is, like Aaron says a 20% improvement. These gains likely came from getting a couple authoritative, topical links which pulled him out of the supplemental. I don’t believe that these changes to the index file are in any way related to being pulled out of the supplemental index.

Hope this helps and congrats Jeremy

February 2, 2007

Shortshire

That is a smart move. I wish I knew which pages I could take out of the sites I am taking care of to get traffic that would help me out.

Biz Card Man

SM, share the secrets!

February 6, 2007

Andrew Kuo

Basically, you allow or disallow robots to index certain pages. Allow pages that are important (your posts), and disallow the ones that are not (ie archives pages,advertising page,search page, etc). By having good, original, unduplicated content indexed, you’ll have a better ranking. Check wikipedia for instructions on how to format robot.txt or using the robot meta tag: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

February 7, 2007

Riotz

Thanks for posting about the robots.txt tip, it got me thinking and realizing just how much useless garbage I have indexed on Google now that’s probably killing me. I’ve blocked some stuff across a few of my sites, hopefully that will bring the same results you saw.